To pile on, they have been steadily employing less people due to technology: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/17/bank-of-america-ceo-brian-mo...
The point here is calling out empty PR, but I’m not going to misrepresent an article without proof. I just have suspicions.
This is a terrible attitude.
Many blue collar jobs are perfectly good well paying careers available without crushing student debt to people who (crazy, I know) don't want to sit by a desk all day.
And that's saying a lot...
Products produced by manual labor will be more expensive than ones that aren't. They largely already are. If the US wants to double-down we'll need to tax robots and apply tariffs to artificially raise the cost of goods produced through automation to even out the discrepancies in efficiency. Is that the path we want to go down? Or would you rather face facts and structure a society, take the yoke off the proletariat (haha) and allow all your fellow countrymen to benefit from the gift that is not having to do manual labor? Wanting your fellow man to toil away in a factory to support your lifestyle is the ultimate elitism.
It's like saying we should go back to the slide-rule because there's good jobs in making them, and you get that down home country feeling using one. I'm not going to be putting my money into slide-rules, I'll stick with Intel.
I’m not arguing for not making progress, but the more we become a digital economy, the more you will have a few fortunate people who work in businesses with 0 marginal costs and make a lot of money and the rest doing the unglamorous poorly paid work.
(a) Unequivocally, Yes. (b) The cost of manufacturing goods in China is within 5% of the cost to manufacture within the US, the difference is the US has cheaper power and China has cheaper labor. If we remove the labor it will be cheaper to manufacture in the US with machines than China with labor, for instance. I'll try and find the economist article where I got this information from.
In fact the promised Foxconn plant in the US was/is going to be almost entirely automated. And why wouldn't it be?
>> I’m not arguing for not making progress, but the more we become a digital economy, the more you will have a few fortunate people who work in businesses with 0 marginal costs and make a lot of money and the rest doing the unglamorous poorly paid work.
This is a social problem, as I mentioned, and the solution isn't to make the lower classes hammer things all day and root around for shiny rocks. That at best slows down the process, it does nothing to reverse it. The solution is to revisit social contract. It'll be a big change, and it will be worth it.
The Foxconn plant is turning out to be a complete fraud....
https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/29/18027032/foxconn-wiscons...
If you had a job copy numbers from one spreadsheet into another spreadsheet, would you not write a script? Which do you think would do a better job?
It's not elitist, it's pragmatic. There are definitely jobs that require physical labor that provide meaningful value at the moment, though the days are numbered there too. Japan developed a fully-automated farm. [1] We shouldn't keep them around just because we don't have something better for the workers to do. It's our social obligation to find them something better to do.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/feb/01/japanese...
But I definitely see more value in the jobs you demean than the "liberal arts".
If all jobs could be automated more cheaply than humans, don't you think they would have done it? There is nothing pragmatic about a liberal arts degree in Ancient Chinese Art History....
>> If all jobs could be automated more cheaply than humans, don't you think they would have done it?
Not everything that's possible has become economical yet. This is kind of the definition of progress :) If all cancer could be cured, don't you think they would have done it by now?
That was sound economic theory somewhat before the digital age and zero marginal cost.
Before, to make more of x you needed more people, input goods, etc. But, when it comes to digital goods the cost of producing more of $x is 0. The fixed cost to produce Windows for example is high but the marginal cost to license Windows to a manufacturer is 0. No matter how many copies of Windows MS sells, they don’t need to hire more people.
There has never been a point in history where 10 people could produce a $1 billion dollar product like Instagram.
This can't help but to lead to a wider gap between the haves and have nots.
Narrowing the gap between the haves and the have nots is something I'm incredibly passionate about too. However, the way to do that IMO isn't by making the have-nots hit things with a hammer in a factory or root around in the ground for shiny rocks while longing for the good old days. It's going to take real social reform and hard work.
With digital, 10 people can produce 100 virtual widgets, 1000, 10,000 or 10,000,000.
Those 10 people are going to get rich (i.e. FAANG software developers) while a lot of people are not going to have anything productive to do where they can make money.
You could say the same about manufacturing.
But what do you propose when there are more structural issues where there just aren’t enough jobs to go around?
— technical roles
— small-businesses
— liberal arts
— or whatever it is they want
Misrepresenting what they said is in incredibly bad-faith, please don’t do this, it’s very disrupting to dialogue.
The other ideas aren’t much better.
- technical roles. The discussion already veered in that direction in the other replies - discussions about 0 marginal costs and how a few people can scale a product to reach millions.
- small business. They don’t earn that much on average, have high capital investments and a lot of times they end up working so much just to keep expenses down their hourly rate is abysmal. Not even considering the number that fail.
https://smallbiztrends.com/2018/07/how-much-do-small-busines...
Do you not know anyone that works in a factory? Spend some time in the South, or in the Midwest. You'll find people who do the same thing day-in and day-out. Those jobs still exist.
I get that people in ivory towers will decry it all as horrible but the fact of the matter is that none of those jobs are any better or worse than the other once you account for people's variable preferences. I'd personally rather do outdoor labor of some sort but some people prefer the air conditioned factory floor.
edit/ Also, throwing boxes for delivery companies or warehouses, you'll be standing at the end of your belt filling up trucks for the entire duration of your 8/12/16 hour shift.
That's just not true.
Come to flyover country. There are many, many jobs that are 'stick metal piece in here remove stamped metal piece there' sorts of work.